Clint wrote an ARCview report about this trip that contained three short case studies, including an interesting overview of Kraft Foods’ implementation of OTM’s transportation-specific business intelligence (BI) tool. Here is what Clint wrote:

Mark Kissell of Kraft Foods and Brian Fish of Chainalytics discussed Kraft’s recent implementation and use of Oracle Fusion Transportation Intelligence (FTI). Kraft Foods manages a complex supply chain that consists of more than 900,000 annual shipments and over 100,000 lane pairings with total annual transportation spend of approximately $1 billion. The company went live with OTM in 2006, which is currently used to manage transportation in the US, Canada, Russia, and Brazil. Kraft previously utilized its ERP business intelligence solution for transportation management, but found it difficult to transfer data from OTM into this particular BI product. The company looked to obtain a reporting solution for widespread use within the transportation function that would inform its users of exceptions and issues to help improve overall decision-making within the transportation function. Kraft purchased and implemented FTI to meet these requirements.

Mark and Brian provided details on the implementation and shared their lessons learned from the process. They stated that establishing a base structure for reporting was both a critical step in the process and an area that is often overlooked. The development of a base structure included defining base cost, volume, and service calculations; the upfront development of the reporting drill-down structure; and the decision to define an individual owner within the organization for every transportation move category. This upfront planning provided a robust foundation for the report and dashboard development process. The drill-down structure was developed with three main structural levels: executive, management, and execution. This structure allowed the appropriate level of information aggregation and detailed breakdown throughout Kraft Transportation. The routing guide dashboard was created with 84 reports. These included the name of the individual lane owner on the bottom of each report to facilitate accountability for the lane specific business processes within the organization. Additionally, the company standardized report formatting to improve usability and minimize confusion. The product’s capabilities and structural design have provided increased visibility, decision-making improvements, and a reduction in data mining requirements in Kraft Transportation.

Analytics is a very hot topic in the industry today, which is why we’ll be writing more about supply chain analytics, especially analytics that support logistics process, in the weeks ahead.